Author: Dillon, John
Biography:
DILLON, John (1792-1868: findmypast.com)
Born in Chelsea, London, where he was baptised on 15 Apr. 1792, he was the son of a bookseller, Robert Dillon, and his wife Mary Ryland, who had been married at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on 24 Apr. 1791. Nothing is known of his education but he was working as a librarian for the clergyman Charles Symmons in 1818 when his play was produced at Covent Garden. It was not a great success. In the same year, on 2 Apr. he married Mary Woolley at All Saints, West Ham, Essex, with whom he had at least four children. Dillon turned from literature to commerce, joining a firm of haberdashers on Fore Street in London as a clerk. He rose to be senior partner in the firm, along with his close friend James Morrison, who had married the daughter of the founder. The firm, renamed Morrison, Dillon, & Co., prospered: Morrison became "the richest commoner in England" and Dillon was able to build a library and art collection of his own. After the death of his first wife, on 21 July 1857 he married Gertrude Maria Case at Hampstead. He died at his home, Netley Lodge, Phillimore Gardens, Kensington, on 23 July 1868, of "hemiplegic paralysis" and exhaustion, leaving an estate with effects valued at under £40,000. (findmypast 3 Feb. 2025; Caroline Dakers, A Genius for Money (2012) 21-3; "Morrison, James" ODNB 5 Sept. 2018; death cert.; information from AA) HJ